The present invention relates to a print system, and more particularly, it relates to a print system which carries out borderless printing for so-called continuous printing which prints a continuous image on long continuous-form paper.
A print system, which is capable of printing on continuous-form paper as a print medium, has become widespread, the continuous-form paper being a roll paper and the like. The print system as described above has a function not only to print on the continuous-form paper an image of normal sizes, such as A4, B5, and regular print size, but also to carry out continuous printing to print a continuous image, such as panoramic photo and a banner, utilizing a property of the continuous-form paper.
In the meantime, when an image or the like captured by a digital camera or the like is printed by a printer, an area (a margin) having no print has been generated on each side portion of the print sheet. In recent years, a technological development has been promoted so as to achieve a printing on the overall surface of the print sheet by eliminating the margin, so called borderless printing, and such a technology has been commercialized. This borderless printing is carried out also for the continuous printing (hereinafter, referred to as “continuous borderless printing”), and it is implemented by the following processing.
As shown in FIG. 4A, an image area which is wider than a width of continuous-form paper by a few millimeters is set up, and a user generates and/or edits image data to be printed by use of the edit display of a printer host. Subsequently, the printer prints the image which is wider than the width of the continuous-form paper in such a manner as protruding from both side regions of the paper, whereby the continuous borderless printing can be carried out.
It is to be noted that the image data used for the continuous printing requires enormous memory area if it is processed at a time. Therefore, in some cases, the image data is divided into several regions (regions divided by broken lines in the figure), and print processing is carried out with respect to each region.